Truth Approximation by Basic and Refined Belief Base Revision

Theo A. F. Kuipers (Groningen) gives a talk at the MCMP Colloquium (25 Jan, 2012) titled "Truth Approximation by Basic and Refined Belief Base Revision". Abstract: In a forthcoming paper, I have generalized the bridge, due to Cevolani, Crupi and Festa (2011), between the conjunctive approach of verisimilitude and AGM-Hansson belief base revision from finite propositional languages to the general case of approaching any divide of a (finite or infinite) universe, allowing all relevant interpretations. The present paper extends this general form of basic truth approximation by ‘basic’ belief base revision to refined (i.e. similarity based) truth approximation by a refined form of belief base revision, inspired by Grove’s spheres approach and Rabinowizc’s similarity foundation of it, which is similar to, but not equivalent to, so-called partial meet revision. The presentation is an improved and extended version of the paper presented at the 14th LMPS-congress (2011) in Nancy. In a previous attempt (Kuipers, 2011) to dovetail belief revision and truth approximation, restricted to the nomic interpretation and to maximal theories, I succeeded in overcoming the problem asking for refinement by taking refined forms of belief revision into account, notably partial meet revision, using already Adam Grove’s spheres approach (Grove, 1988) and Wlodek Rabinowizc’s similarity foundation of it (Rabinowicz, 1995). However, that dovetail attempt was unsatisfactory in having an ad hoc feature already in its basic form.